Absentia: A Retrospective

   

DIGITAL CINEMA, CIRCA 2000
I remember shooting my first feature, Makebelieve, on the Sony DVX 2000 almost 11 years ago. Digital filmmaking was something of a novelty back then, a new and exciting fad that brought the ability to make a feature film down to the masses. Like Prometheus, Digital Cinema promised to ignite the creativity of the mere mortal filmmakers, and making a feature film was no longer proprietary to the studio gods.

The overwhelming joy that "anyone can make a movie" soon gave way to the horrifying realization that the "anyone" in that sentiment included people who had no business making movies. As Dogme 95 drifted in and out of vogue and digital fare like Chuck & Buck was hitting the screens in Park City, an avalanche of digital features that were barely watchable descended on the film festival circuit.

Anyone could make a movie – unfortunately, that included that strange basement dweller with the hamster maze and the torture fetish.

For better or worse I was part of that avalanche, shooting my second feature Still Life on the Canon XL-1 in 2001, graduating to 24 frames per second with my third feature Ghosts of Hamilton Street on the Panasonic DVX-100 in 2003. I went High Def in 2005 with my horror short Oculus on the Sony HDR-FX1. Less than six years after the first MiniDV features began to hit the marketplace, the world had changed so, so much, and even the hamster torture movies could find distribution on the internet.

I purchased a second-hand JVC-GY110 to shoot a documentary in 2009 and was stunned by just how much the digital landscape had changed, even in the years since I shot Oculus. Full HD, 24p, RED, – it wasn't simply that anyone could make a movie anymore, it was suddenly that just about anyone could make a movie that looked, for lack of a better way of saying it, "like a movie."

While HD became a popular fad among established Hollywood directors, who took to it like wheat grass shots or Kabala, heavyweights like George Lucas started having comparison screenings daring people to try to tell the difference between film and High Def. Mainstream films started screening HD flicks for the masses, job titles like 'Film Loader' began their slow plunge into obscurity, and any college freshman could suddenly produce content that looked ready for broadcast.

Even that, it turned out, wasn't necessary – production value mattered less and less, and I just about fell over when I saw movies shot on consumer DV cameras making boatloads of money. A camera, a tripod, a bedroom, and some fishing twine was all you needed to pull in a 70 million dollar domestic opening weekend. It was impossible not to resent the success of movies like, Paranormal Activity, who were able to scare up astonishing profits using ingredients available to high school AV clubs. If they could do it, why couldn't I?

So when I decided to try to make a feature just after the New Year rang in 2010, my plans were actually very basic. I wasn't going to hustle around LA looking for financing, I wasn't going to try to build a huge HD crew around a RED cam; instead, I was going to go back to the basics. I'd shoot a feature myself on my JVC with a skeleton crew, and only available lighting, in my own apartment. I'd put all my energy into the story and performances, and see just what kind of a feature one could make, quite literally, from scratch. Any dollar it could ever make, if I did it right, would be profit.

That's not the way it ended up.

What started as a weekend "catch as catch can" project became a journey through some of the most dynamic and fiercely debated facets of the emerging new model for indie filmmaking, from crowd funding on Kickstarter.com and IndieGogo, to a full-on feature production on a now-famous DSLR, the Canon 5D Mark II. I hope this little production journal, after the fact though it may be, becomes of some use to those new filmmakers who have at their fingertips technology and opportunities I wouldn't have dreamed of when I endeavored to make my first film, only a decade ago.

BEST LAID PLANS
I approached the actors with the idea for a horror feature, then called "Wrinkle" - for reasons I can't even begin to understand, much less explain - before the script was written. It was in February of 2010 that serious discussion began about actually trying to go into production sometime that summer. The pitch was easy and casual, and I'd be lying if I said people took it seriously. "We'll shoot a horror feature at my apartment. Weekends, nights, whenever we feel like it. No crew. No lights. I'll operate the camera and we'll slap some wireless mics on you guys."

I think, if I remember right, that the phrase "F@#k Paranormal Activity" was an integral part of this initial proposal.

The questions that came after this were half interested. What was this to be about? "Not sure yet, but I want to use the creepy tunnel across the street from my apartment." Who would star in it? Who else – my friends who were trying to be working actors in LA; basically the folks I tended to hang around with on weekends anyway.

At the time I was more excited about rolling doc footage on the project. I thought a documentary about trying to make a film with nothing would prove to be fascinating no matter how the film turned out. If the film was good, it'd be a neat record of what you could do with no resources. If it was a disaster, it'd be a fascinating documentary about people crashing and burning: a cautionary tale of the realities of microbudget filmmaking. It was Dogme 2010, and for me the movie itself would be secondary to the documentary footage of the attempt to make it.

"About this 'no lights' thing," my friend (and later Absentia Co-Producer Joe Wicker said one night. "I mean … you're probably going to need lights. In the tunnel, for sure."

I went across the street with my JVC and shot some test footage at night. I digitized it into my home Final Cut Pro system (a refurbished iMac) and sat back to see what we'd be working with. It was dark, to be sure. It had video grain the size of softballs floating through it, but so what – that actually made me a bit nostalgic for those early Dogme 95 releases (which had shunned such snobberies as lights, microphones, visibility and such).

I showed the footage to Joe and announced cheerfully that it would work just fine. He looked at me like I'd just bitten the head off a chicken and offered him the neck, and managed a smile. "I'll ask around a little about some free lights," he said.

The reception from the actors wasn't much better. Dave Levine, who would play Detective Mallory in the film, reacted with polite apathy. It sounded like fun, but generated little enthusiasm. Katie Parker, who would later play Callie, expressed outright skepticism that I was being serious, or that the project would ever find its way off the ground.

My girlfriend Courtney Bell, a fine actress who would later play Tricia in the film, was receptive and supportive of the idea but full of practical questions that I frankly had no answers for at the time, other than "F@%k Paranormal Activity."

Her friend Morgan Brown, who had acted with her back in D.C, was trying to get a fledgling production company off the ground at the time and we met up for dinner one night. She suggested I mention the project to him, I did, and he was receptive. It was more to offer him a role as an actor, but if it also would help get the production company going, well that'd be just fine too.

The movie was really just a cool little idea, a tiny experiment of a film that might put a feature on the fledgling Fallback Plan Productions' roster and give our circle of friends something cool to work on during the summer. Morgan would bring it up to his partner at Fallback, Justin Gordon (who I'd never met), and we'd see where the chips fell.

WHO NEEDS A SCRIPT?
Courtney discovered she was pregnant in February and we were thrilled. This meant, though, that production on "Wrinkle" needed to be accelerated so that she'd be physically able to perform in the film over the summer, and it frankly meant that we needed to discuss writing the pregnancy into the plot … which was easy, as no plot existed.

Thus, the pregnancy really made the rest of Absentia fall quickly into place, and from that point on there was never any time to pause and reflect on what we were doing. We were heading into production in June or July, we had a creepy tunnel and some basic HD equipment, we had a small cast of talented friends, and we had a few months before the pregnancy would make Courtney's participation very difficult, if not impossible. To miss this window meant missing the entire opportunity to make the film, as the baby would mean another shot at a feature might be years away.

But precisely because this was so simple, precisely because we had and wanted no money, and precisely because this was to be a little unfunded, unlit experiment, we could shrug this timeline off and move forward. It wasn't a real movie, after all, and what was the harm? It wouldn't cost us anything but time.

THE PEE TUNNEL
I'd lived across the street from the creepy, urine-soaked foot tunnel that run under the 134 freeway for almost four years and knew it was a frightening setting in its own right. Covered with spider webs and graffiti, and lit by flickering fluorescent lights at night, it was a great canvass for a scary story.

I took inventory of what I had to work with – a tunnel, my apartment, and my actor friends. No money. No permits. What could the story be?

I posed the question to my brother James (who would appear in the film as Jamie Lambert) on the phone, and had barely gotten the words out of my mouth when he piped up. "That's easy; Billy Goats Gruff, man. You got a tunnel; you got a troll. Done." I laughed out loud, and for just a moment an image run through my mind. It was of the tunnel, lit up at night, with a MISSING PERSONS poster on a post in front of it. Inside, a pair of glowing eyes.

"That's it. Thanks, bro." I don't know if he thought I was humoring him, but he kind of laughed and said "uh, you're welcome." Thus, I knew the story – it was of two sisters (Katie and Courtney), who lost someone close to them. And that person was last seen in the creepy tunnel across the street. I looked into what goes into declaring someone missing, and finally "dead in Absentia," and it clicked into place. The project would be called Absentia and we'd figure out the rest later.

WAIT, THAT THING SHOOTS VIDEO?
While visiting with my friend Rustin Cerveny, a wedding videographer who had shot behind the scenes stills for Oculus, we talked about him shooting stills for Absentia. He thought shooting on my JVC sounded like a waste of time. He had a Canon 5D Mark II, a still camera, that had the ability to capture video in full HD, 24 frames a second. I looked at the camera and laughed – it looked like the cameras that tourists on Hollywood Boulevard wore around their necks outside of Mann's Chinese Theatre.

He assured me the video quality was excellent, and that the Canon lenses gave it a cinematic depth of field that people spent tens of thousands of dollars to artificially produce. I looked at the footage and was pretty blown away. He suggested we should shoot the movie on that camera, and wanted to be the DP if we did.

We decided to set up a camera test to see exactly what we'd be working with if we opted for this camera. My specifications were clear – we'd shoot in the tunnel, at night, and in my apartment. Available light only.

By this point, though, images and moments from the eventual story were already tumbling around in my head. Why just shoot random footage when we could shoot something like what we wanted the movie to be? Not a trailer, per se, but a medley of the scenes I thought would surely be part of the film. We assembled the cast, made a shot list, and shot this video in about six hours on a Friday night. I cut it together on Saturday, and on Sunday we suddenly had a real movie.

Before we had a penny in the budget, or a script for that matter, we'd put together this "Teaser Trailer." The possibilities suddenly opened up before us.

The camera was gorgeous, particularly in low light. The DSLR workflow was easy on my Final Cut system – I imported the footage directly from the SanDisk reader. I only had to download the Canon DSLR plugin for Final Cut, which was free, and we were off to the races.

We unveiled the "teaser trailer" and suddenly realized this project required more attention than we initially thought. The 5D was great, but it needed enhancements to be even better. We needed a rig, first of all. Follow Focus. How would we record sound? The wireless microphones couldn't feed directly into the little camera, we'd have to shoot two system. Would we need a focus puller?

One thing was for sure. We'd need some MONEY. Not much, we figured at the time, just enough to support the DSLR workflow on the set. Oh yeah, and a script would be helpful too …

INSTANT SCRIPT: JUST ADD RIESLING.
The first draft took only three days. I'd written feature scripts before, ten in all, but this one was different in that I went into each scene with the specific knowledge of my limitations, both geographically and monetarily. I knew who my actors were. To an extent, I knew what their strengths and weaknesses were. The assumption was that we'd have no money, no effects, no room for difficult scenes. It was all about the bare minimum.

The teaser trailer became the blueprint for the screenplay, instead of the other way around. We'd already hit the major story beats just in the teaser, without giving any thought to their connective tissue. All I had to do, in theory, was figure out the scenes in between.

Somewhere early in the first draft I fell in love with the movie, and sat back from my computer realizing that this could be something more than an experiment in minimalist filmmaking – this could be a good movie, too.

The first draft was finished late on a Saturday night, while I was home alone and burning through a bottle of Riesling. By the bottom of the bottle, I'd cranked out the final 40 pages of the script in that one sitting, and I was taking this venture a lot more seriously.

I'm used to spending months, sometimes years, on a script. This was done quickly because it had to be, but that also meant there was no second-guessing the plot – each scene was a spontaneous, gut reaction to the scene before it, and it was a thrilling, constant feeling of discovery as the story fell into line. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this workflow to anyone else, and don't plan on repeating it – it could have been a DISASTER. But for whatever reason, it worked out – and this became a trend that would carry us through the whole process of production, thankfully.

KICKSTARTED
I distributed the first draft to the guys at Fallback and to the actors who were already on the hook. The lead roles were specifically written for Katie, Courtney, Dave Levine, and Morgan Brown. Everyone was very happy with the draft, and suddenly the levels of enthusiasm started to grow. This wasn't just a weekend horror experiment, this was a neat character piece about grief and unexplainable loss…themes I hadn't intended on dealing with, but were certainly permeating the story because of a tragic family death that had occurred back in early February.

They resonated with the cast and producers and suddenly we were staring down the barrel of a potentially "real" movie. Morgan and Justin set out to begin to scare up some funding through private investors. "Ten thousand oughta do it," we thought at first. As Rustin's wish-list for supplemental equipment for the DSLR grew, that number seemed less realistic.

While the leads were cast before writing began, the supporting roles were up for grabs. There was no casting director, or time to audition, so it just became about filling them in with people we knew and trusted. Justin Gordon took the role of Det. Lonergan (one of the perks of being an actor AND a producer) and I wanted to bring my brother James and Oculus star Scott Graham into it just on principle.

Morgan had friends in mind for other supporting roles, and each of those roles was distributed without fuss or fanfare. The actors received their parts practically giftwrapped, without having to read or screen test for them. We gave them a tentative shooting window and left it at that.

A major casting moment came when Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy star Doug Jones agreed to take a look at the script for a possible cameo. If he accepted the role of Walter Lambert, he would be the first Name Actor I'd ever worked on a film, and he'd lend the production credibility in the marketplace. We were in touch with him through a contact that Rustin had made while working on a commercial the year before, and we sent the script along and waited eagerly for his reaction.

Finding money was slow-going, as it always is, and one day Justin suggested a website he'd heard of called Kickstarter.com. I'd heard of it, too, and went to take a look. This crowd-funding thing seemed sketchy to me. The idea of putting a project up on a website, and then asking people to "donate" money to it, was frankly just weird. Kickstarter also had a deadline feature, where you had to determine how much money you wanted to try to raise, and how long you thought it would take.

What I didn't realize was that Kickstarter.com would prove to be the most significant, effort intensive, and exciting part of the entire process of making Absentia. In more ways than just the money, the film wouldn't exist without that website. Kickstarter, and other crowd funding sites like it, are not designed to assist you with the raising of money – you still have to do the lion's share of it yourself.

Through a surprisingly intense marketing strategy (that I outline in my Kickstarted article), we were able to make the site work for us beyond our initial hopes.

We weren't just funding the movie on Kickstarter, we were finding our crew, our extras, our walk-on parts. The more specific prizes we "auctioned" away, like featuring someone's face on a missing poster or even in a speaking role, the more we simultaneously filled in pre-production gaps while raising money. It had a life of its own, and it was making this whole production turn into something far greater than we ever hoped.

Toward the end of the drive we got word that Doug Jones would join the cast, and it seemed like all the stars had aligned to make this movie something special.

By the end of the day on June 6th, our Kickstarter campaign had given us a sound recordist, an audience of several thousand people anxiously waiting to see the movie, and $25,000.

INTO THE TUNNEL WITH THE 5D MARK II
The production experience of Absentia ended up being something in between a true independent feature and the bare-bones, Dogme-esque experiment I initially thought it would be. We had a 15 day production schedule, primarily shooting in and around my apartment, the tunnel, and a few days at a standing set studio in Orange County called Silver Dream Studios.

We had a production crew of eight people, and the actors filled in as PA's, many even holding the boom or slate when they weren't in a scene. We had two panel LED lights, but barely used them. Predominantly, we actually used only available light for about 85% of the shoot.

The schedule was murder and the quarters were cramped. One of our lead actresses was five months pregnant, and her home was occupied by a dozen people on a daily basis. There was no room to move, no privacy. There are four main rooms in my apartment, and if one was functioning as "the set," the other three were taken over by wardrobe, makeup, craft service, video village, and staging.

The first week was entirely interior night shoots, and the close quarters and odd hours brought a very surreal quality to the shoot. We were piled in on top of each other and had cast and crew members sleeping on the set in between work shifts. Actors were shoved into corners to be made up while wardrobe had to constantly move our clothes racks from room to room depending on where we were shooting. (In fact, the racks quickly fell apart and remained jerry-rigged for the rest of the shoot.)

The cast had additional challenges to face as well. Many hadn't worked on a feature film before, or came from a primarily theatrical background, and hadn't had to contend with the type of hours, non-linear character arcs, and continuity concerns that come with a feature. With the schedule as tight as it was, this meant that many set-ups had to be captured in a take or two.

Shooting in the tunnel was actually the easiest thing we did from a technical standpoint. We never did use lighting other than what was already there for the night shoots, and the sunlight for the day shoots. It was like every other indie set I'd ever worked out, except with fewer bodies and less time. We rented a full lighting package for our days at Silver Dream studios, but ended up using almost none of it thanks to the 5D Mark II.

A particularly adventurous moment at Silver Dream happened on our first day at the studio. Rustin collapsed on the set, a victim of a nasty illness he had caught from his young son at home. With Silver Dream studios charging by the hour and without another DP I trusted with the camera, we suddenly found ourselves staring down the barrel of losing a day. The day would be an expensive one, and if we lost it, we could not afford to come back again.

More terrified than I'd ever admit at the time, I decided to pick up the camera myself while Rustin recovered at home, crossing my fingers that I wouldn't destroy the movie in the process.

Our production sound operated entirely separately, using a wireless boom for the majority of the shoot and only occasionally opting to go with wireless lavs on the actors if we had complicated blocking or multiple speaking characters in a single shot. We slated each take and syncing in post was a no-brainer.

When the day came to shoot Doug Jones' scenes, we had really hit our stride as a crew. We were sleep deprived, but we were all in good spirits. And, this was an opportunity to get out of the confines of the apartment set and venture out into the streets of Glendale. This was, truly, the highlight of the experience for me. Doug is amazing, and having a professional on the set encouraged everyone to step up their game.

I also made sure to afford myself a luxurious amount of time to cover Doug's scenes. After all, if you get a day with a name actor, the last thing you want is to have to rush the scene. If I remember right, the scene Katie meeting Doug in the tunnel was covered from twenty different angles. The most impressive thing to me, as I went into editing, was realizing that his continuity remained exact throughout each and every take.

For our miniscule budget, and considering that we basically utilized no lights, no dollies, and no standard production equipment, the images we were able to capture with the 5D Mark II were nothing short of stunning.

And so, partially in order to help raise finishing funds while we were shooting, we cut together this "Sizzle Reel" while on the set to show off footage from our first week of production.

DEBRIEFING
We wrapped Absentia on July 7th, 2010. The picture lock cut of the film was ready about two months later, and now the film is heading out into the festival circuit and marketplace to try to find an audience and, hopefully, a sale.

It was, without a doubt, the fastest, most breathlessly accelerated production experience of my life. I wouldn't recommend that people emulate it in that respect, and know that such experiences are useless unless they provide sound examples and advice for other filmmakers thinking of going down the same rabbit hole, which I feel this project certainly did.

Independent feature filmmaking is, frankly, insane. It's an insanity to undertake. It is expensive, stressful, and completely illogical. But for some people, like me, it's impossible to resist. If you're going to go for it, start basic. Start with what you have at your fingertips. The technology is finally there to let you make something that looks and sounds terrific, so count that in your bag of tricks – but don't let it replace the most important trick of all, which is your vision.

We live in a world where you can raise money from strangers on the internet to shoot a movie, and owe them nothing of it back. We live in a world where you can buy a camera for less than $1000 that can shoot full HD, 24p, and sport a filmic depth of field (my new Rebel T2i looks just lovely). Because we have these tools, it just means that MORE effort must go into making sure that the stories we tell are worth telling, and told well. Those talents lie in the instincts of writers, directors, DP's, and sound artists, and cannot be replaced by technology.

After all, once Prometheus gave mortals the gift of fire, there were still people who couldn't think of anything better to do with it than lighting bags of feces ablaze on peoples' porches.

Mike Flanagan is an award-winning writer, director and editor of four feature films, including the critically acclaimed horror film ABSENTIA. Based in Los Angeles, Mike has also worked as a professional television editor for over a decade, helming programming for Discovery, Bravo, A&E, and other networks. He is currently in pre-production on his fifth feature film, OCULUS, a feature version of his award-winning short.

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